why it’s one of the most effective ways to improve the world • why it’s hard • “local context plus high standards” • how to get started • where to live • what to work on | Continue reading
Shortly after I started blogging, because I was a college student and had nothing better to do, I set a goal to write every week. I started in September 2013 and wrote around 150 posts between then and when I started working at Wave. (At that point I stopped having nothing better … | Continue reading
(The way you can *really* tell something is horribly wrong is that grad students find PhD Comics darkly funny, not just dark.) | Continue reading
When I started dating my partner, I quickly noticed that grad school was making her very sad.This was shortly after I’d started leading an engineering team at Wave, and so the “obvious” hypothesis to me was that the management (okay, “management”) one gets in graduate school is t … | Continue reading
Most code editors color different pieces of your program in different ways. For instance, they’ll make keywords like if bold and bright so that you notice when you’ve misspelled them. They’ll make non-executable parts like comments and documentation fainter so that you know that … | Continue reading
A lot of smart college students end up with the idea that “solving hard technical problems” is the best thing they can do with their life—probably because that’s the only thing they’ve ever been rewarded for so far. | Continue reading
I recently read Coders at Work by Peter Seibel, which is a collection of interviews with famous programmers. It was a pretty interesting look at their backgrounds, programming processes, and what they thought was important to focus on. Here I collect some quotes on common themes. | Continue reading
Life is short • There is no speed limit • How to Be Successful • You and your research • Becoming a Magician • 95th percentile isn’t that good | Continue reading
When I’ve listened the most effectively to people, it’s because I was intensely curious—I was trying to build a detailed, precise understanding of what was going on in their head. | Continue reading
Why it’s worth it to deeply understand the fiddly, boring-seeming details of the computer systems you use every day. | Continue reading
I spent way too long figuring out the how to make video calls feel natural. Here’s the best advice I came up with. | Continue reading
I spent way too long figuring out the how to make video calls feel natural. Here’s the best advice I came up with. | Continue reading
I’ve written about exploration and exploitation before, but I realized recently that this may be more important than I thought. Talking to a friend about what different people thought about what role effort vs. innate ability played in success, I went down my list of successes an … | Continue reading
“As I looked around and realized for the hundredth time that I was surrounded by people exactly like me, something inside me snapped. I downloaded the latest American Community Survey microdata, fired up R and started calculating feverishly.” | Continue reading
no badges • close slack • check email 1x/day • keep todos visible • use rss • kindle + rss • hide phone apps • block ui elements • block sites • better window switcher • no tabs | Continue reading
how to ration your shower thoughts • care viscerally • monotask • evade obligations • timebox bullshit | Continue reading
no badges • close slack • check email 1x/day • keep todos visible • use rss • kindle + rss • hide phone apps • block ui elements • block sites • better window switcher • no tabs | Continue reading
Impatience is the best way to get faster at things. And across a surprising number of domains, being really fast correlates strongly with being effective. | Continue reading
Computers can be understood • Choose Boring Technology • The Wrong Abstraction • Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names • The Hiring Post • The Product-Minded Engineer • Write code that is easy to delete, not easy to extend • The Law of Leaky Abstractions • Reflections on sof … | Continue reading
Many large companies today are software monopolies that give their product away for free to get monopoly status, then do horrible things. Can we do anything about this? | Continue reading
(Attention conservation notice: only useful if you have a static site that you’d like to remove the Javascript from. I don’t normally find “how to do X with Blub and Glug” tech posts very useful, but this one took me a while to figure out how to do simply, and I’m hoping it will … | Continue reading
how it works • example topics • compounding improvements • what I’ve gotten out of it • tips | Continue reading
Over and over again, I’ve seen people fix some wireless-related problem and go “wow, I had no idea how much better this could be!” • Wireless protocols often silently operate in an extremely degraded state that makes them substantially worse than wired equivalents. | Continue reading
fast vs slow feedback • modeling people vs. modeling the problem • mentors vs. mistakes • why you should do the hard thing now | Continue reading
It’s college decision season! To celebrate, I’ve been thinking about what I would have told myself in 2011 when I was deciding where to attend. | Continue reading
For some reason, a lot of smart college students end up with the idea that “solving hard technical problems” is the best thing they can do with their life. Why does this happen? Probably because that’s the only thing they’ve been rewarded for over the past 15 years. | Continue reading
Some quotes from Coders at Work on how people approach debugging. | Continue reading
Why zsh is really better than bash • how I started moving twice as fast in python • what else can you autocomplete • on maximizing interface bandwidth | Continue reading
When I started dating my partner, I quickly noticed that grad school was making her very sad. This was shortly after I’d started leading an engineering team at Wave, and so the “obvious” hypothesis to me was that the management (okay, “management”) one gets in graduate school is … | Continue reading
(The way you can *really* tell something is horribly wrong is that grad students find PhD Comics darkly funny, not just dark.) | Continue reading
Most code editors color different pieces of your program in different ways. For instance, they’ll make keywords like if bold and bright so that you notice when you’ve misspelled them. They’ll make non-executable parts like comments and documentation fainter so that you know that … | Continue reading
The effect was huge: I became dramatically more productive between 3:30pm and whenever I turned off the light. I estimate the lamp bought me between half an hour and two hours a day, depending on how overcast it was. | Continue reading
Wave1 is a for-profit, venture backed startup building cheap, instant money transfer to and within Africa. Since launching in 2015, we’ve become by far the biggest remitter to Kenya and Ghana, saving our users and recipients over $100 million so far. Our biggest source of expecte … | Continue reading
People often make several complaints about how employment works at startups: They don’t pay well. They claim to make up the difference with stock options, but the options are worthless and you can earn more by working for a big stable company. They prey on starry-eyed, young, nai … | Continue reading
Within the effective altruism community, people often talk about “long-termist” vs “short-termist” worldviews. The official distinction between the two is that short-termists prioritize problems by how they affect people alive today, while long-termists prioritize problems by how … | Continue reading
This year I met my donation goal again, and donated in the same proportions as last year. | Continue reading
I really enjoy using RSS to get updates from my favorite writers. But recently I noticed that my RSS feed was starting to get the same distracting pull as Hacker News. I was still under the thumb of the little red badge! To escape, I decided to experiment with reading … | Continue reading
“Write down the problem; Think real hard; Write down the solution”–it actually works. | Continue reading